


Not This Time

by sapphire2309



Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-05-24 16:24:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6159547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire2309/pseuds/sapphire2309
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only real thing wrong with Neal is that he's young. And that's something time can always cure. Will he let it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not This Time

**Author's Note:**

> The summary is a modified version of [this prompt](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/587799.html?thread=81705495#t81705495) from comment_fic (which tigriswolf, the prompter, mentioned is from Jack Schaffer's 'Shane'). I thought of the title because of a lyric from Christina Perri's Butterfly, and then immediately heard Taylor Swift singing "Not this time" (from I Know Places). Music. *sigh*. This is for Challenge 16a at writerverse. I see this as set in S2, after Countermeasures, but you can read it however you like :)  
>  **Disclaimer:** White Collar is Jeff Eastin's brainchild. Not mine.  
> 

Neal's been in a dance with time ever since he ran away from home. All the hurt, all the knowledge, all the inevitable by-products of accumulating days and months and years keep pulling him down, trying to make him older, wiser, more cynical, less naive, everything he doesn't want to be.

He wants to keep believing that there's always a way out. And if he grows up, he's terribly afraid that he'll suddenly decide that the risks aren't worth it and decide to stay trapped instead of leaving when he can.

He's weathered all the rocks he's been thrown up against, made an art of molding himself around jagged edges, pretended he was bruised when he was only bent, gave just a little, then snatched it all back.

But then time deposited him at Peter's side. Which may just be the most cruel tactic of all.

And now he doesn't know whether to give in or keep resisting, because when Peter says things like "Grow up," with the softest possible look in his warm brown eyes, he _wants_ to. Peter's words work better than all the battering that time could inflict.

Or they would if he let them.

He's been letting them go with an almost aggressive passion, nodding along to words he's already forgotten, tossed them into the wind, easy as ever. Cynicism isn't a look that suits him. And he doesn't know who he'd be if he didn't believe that there was always a way out. Not himself, surely.

But it isn't easy to let Peter's words go when he cares so damn much. He cares about what Peter thinks in a way that's completely unfamiliar to him.

Time has started fighting dirty.

If he closes his eyes, he thinks he can feel himself being pulled away from the six year old child's mentality that he's worked so hard to hold on to. Worse still, he doesn't mind too much.

He's not going to topple over that easily. He knows how time works, he knows how to fight it.

But what happens when he wants to give in?


End file.
